In a field of industrial and business translation, efficient translation is required while high quality is maintained. Therefore, a bilingual-example-sentence retrieving system for retrieving pairs of sentences which have been translated before and corresponding original sentences stored in a database and reusing the retrieved pairs of translated sentences and the corresponding original sentences has been used.
In the bilingual-example-sentence retrieving system, an example sentence corresponding to an input sentence is retrieved from the database, and a translated sentence corresponding to the detected sentence is displayed. By referring to such translated sentences as described above, efficient translation can be attained when compared with a case where translation is performed from scratch. However, when a newly created sentence is translated, it is unlikely that an example sentence perfectly corresponding to an input sentence is detected. Therefore, a technique of generating partial sequences of the input sentence and detecting phrase candidates corresponding to a portion of the input sentence using the partial sequences has been proposed (for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2006-134062).
Furthermore, a technique of assigning information on an upper-level link or a lower level link to a translated example sentence detected through retrieval using an input sentence and partial sequences of the input sentence and performing display of an example sentence including the translated example sentence detected on the basis of the link information in an expansion manner or performing display of an example sentence using a portion of the translated example sentence which has been detected in a shrinking manner has been proposed (for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-165563).